Paper Short Abstract:

The enlargement of the roles of the army in French overseas dependencies couples with the expansion of market-oriented civic-educational offers aimed at disciplining marginal categories of citizens. These patterns are eagerly embraced by local actors and unsettle the dualism of colonizer/colonized.

Paper Abstract:

« Le Polynésien peux devenir président! » exclaimed Noa to the amazed-looking class sitting in front of him. He continued by praising the Service Militaire Adapté (SMA), saying that through this vocational military program they – the young and disoriented newly enrolled soldiers attending the class – could become, one day, successful men like him. The SMA, founded in the 1960s to overcome imperial anxieties and to foster French territorial cohesion in the overseas dependencies, is today renowned for offering a second chance to struggling youth and boosting everyone’s capacity by teaching specific professionalizing skills. Such an enlargement of the roles and functions carried out by the army in French overseas dependencies coupled with the expansion of market-oriented civic-educational offers aimed at regimenting and disciplining marginal categories of citizens. These patterns of neoliberal paternalism in the management of poor and marginalized categories are eagerly embraced by local actors, as the example of Noa shows. Joining the army allows Polynesian social actors to express their will to succeed given the limited aspirations available to them and sets the base for the creation of asymmetrical relations of power not only among French metropolitans and Polynesians but also among Polynesians who join the army and obtain privileges (while reproducing colonial patterns and behaviors) and those who decide not to enter the corps. Such a paradoxical positioning, being both of and against the empire, unsettles the dualism of colonizer and colonized showing the coloniality inscribed in the system itself.